


The Lindberg House

by alonsimo



Category: Original Work
Genre: Child Abuse, Ghosts, Multi, Murder, Original Character Death(s), Suicide, Tags May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-03
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-06-06 02:16:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6733921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alonsimo/pseuds/alonsimo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 1892, the Lindberg House was the site of what seemed to be a rage-inspired fratricide.<br/>In 1908, it housed another.<br/>In 1913, another.<br/>And again in 1926.<br/>Once a decade, a family moves into the house, and once a decade, a parent kills one or more of their children in the house before killing themselves.<br/>The parent moves on to join the malevolent energy in the walls and permeate the mind of the next.<br/>The child becomes a ghost, wandering the halls with the victims of previous years, preparing to guard the next young one to come along.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Local Legend

The Lindberg Estate is haunted, and that is an undeniable fact. While it's true that there are ghosts living on the interior of the house, there's also more of a powerful, permating spirit in the walls of the house itself. 

Legend says a Swedish family moved into the English town of Stokesborough around 1892. The family consisted of a mother, Cerioth, a father, Walker, and three children, Taloth, Rythian, and Rylarth. Halloween of that year, the family held a gathering to celebrate the holiday. The youngest daughter, Ry, hid up in her attic bedroom for the first part of the celebration. Cerioth wanted her daughter to come down and pretend to be social for at least a few minutes, or at least that's what she said, and went upstairs to find them. After a few hours passed without any sign of the two missing members, the rest of the family went upstairs to search, leaving the guests below. Little did they know, that was the last time they'd ever be seen alive. 

First, the guests heard Walker shouting at his wife to stop. Bang.  
Then, what sounded like Taloth screaming. Bang.  
Next, Rythian shouting his sisters' names in clear distress. Bang.  
One final gunshot, and then it was suffocatingly silent.

One brave soul went up the stairs to see what had happened. What he found was, as he says, undescribable. In the first bathroom of the house, Ry was drowned dead in a bathtub, Walker, Tal, and Rythian were all shot, Cerioth had clearly shot herself after doing the same to 3/4 of the rest of her family, and to everyone's surprise, the young Lady Eva Lystwine was with them, a small dagger that seemed to be her own protruding from her chest, tears running down her face. 

Nobody knows why it happened.  
Nobody, except Cerioth, whose malevolent spirit infects the easiest parent in the house that it can and drive them to do the same thing she did.  
Nobody, except Rylarth, who has vowed to protect the children of these parents and give them the love the house had stolen from them until it's destroyed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! So this is my first work on the archives, which speaks for itself. If you find any typos or if this chapter is completely incomprehensible, please leave a comment so that can get fixed. Updates are a bit spontaneous, but they won't stop unannounced, I promise. Thanks!


	2. Moving Day

Wednesday, March 4th, 1908

It was a mild day when the McQuarrys moved into what was now called Lindberg House. They were the last people anyone expected to move in, seeing as Rosa McQuarry's neice had died there relatively recently. When asked, Mrs. McQuarry would say that they'd decided upon that particular house in that particular little hollow out of pure chance, not knowing the connection to her family history until after the house had been purchased. She was lying through her teeth. How could she explain the supernatural draw, a strong, pulsing need to stay there? It had been strong with both her and her husband, Wayland, ever since they came down for the funeral. So strong, in fact, that they decided to uproot their family from Glasglow and move all the way down to the southern tip of England. 

The family had no trouble getting moved in. The only conflict arose when Rosa decided to let her children choose which rooms they'd be staying and accidentally mentioned the attic. Sylvain, the oldest, latched onto the idea instantaneously. Something about the attic had been pulling at her since she first noticed its presence. Of course, her little brother Eric had exclaimed his interest as well. "Can I go up? Can I? Can I? Pleeeease?" He begged his mother.  
"No, you'd best stay down with your father and I," Rosa replied calmly.  
"But why?" Eric whined.  
"You're too young, I want to be able to get to you if you need me."  
"Fine." The boy was disappointed, but didn't dare challenge his mother any further.  
"May I stay in the room then?" Sylvain asked, trying to mask her joy at her brother's defeat by tugging at one of her carrot-colored curls.  
"Well... Alright. But if I hear you running around up there at all hours, it's right back down with you young lady. Understand?"  
"Yes ma'am!" Sylvie exclaimed excitedly. The door to the attic room was already open, almost as if it had been waiting for her. When she climbed up the creaking stairs, a flicker of movement in a dark corner caught her eye. The wind blowing dust, maybe, or a cobweb fluttering. Those didn't explain the strange wet patches on the floor in that corner, though.

\---

Night had fallen upon the grey stone house. Everyone was tucked into their beds, and all but one was asleep. Sylvain was sitting bolt upright, clutching her orange bedsheets in white fists to her chest in terror. In the corner of her room, the same corner where wet footprints once were, a person stood. The specter's long, curly hair subtly floated around her head except for the bangs that covered her left eye. She was wearing what looked like a ballgown, notably longsleeved, which also appeared to float. As the spirit approached her, Sylvain began to tremble. This seemed to alarm the ghost, who stopped suddenly and spoke. There was a heavy accent to her calm, almost maternal voice that Sylvain couldn't place. "Are you alright, barn?"  
"A-are you calling me a barn?" Sylvie asked defensively.  
The spirit laughed, "Oh, no dear. It means child. Deepest apologies. The question still remains to be answered."  
"I'll be fine when you tell me who you are."  
"My name is Ry. What about yours?"  
"Sylvain. I've heard about you before."  
"I'm not surprised. Your cousin was a...a very good friend of mine." Ry's face took on a more sullen, mourning expression. It piqued the curiousity of the small girl in front of her.  
"Why are you sad?"  
"No reason you need to worry about right now," Her expression changed again, removing any sign of grief, "I just came to say hello, and tell you that I'll be around. If you need me, just come up here and call."  
"Can you leave the attic?" Sylvain yawned. She hadn't realized how tired she was until now.  
"Yes, but you wouldn't want your family thinking you were talking to nothing, would you?"  
"I guess I wouldn't..."  
"Exactly. It's late, child. You should sleep."  
"Do I have to?" Sylvain asked quietly, though she was already slipping under the covers.  
"Yes. Goodnight, Sylvie."  
"Night, Miss Ry."  
Rylarth 'walked' back to her corner, turned back to face the now sleeping Sylvain, and vanished.  
There had been tears in her eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again! As before, please comment if you find typos or inconsistencies. Thanks!


	3. Progressing Stages

The next few weeks at the McQuarry house were almost exactly as they were before the move. The family would wake up and eat together, Wayland would go to the law office in town for work, the children woud go outside to play or meet with their tutors depending on the day, and Rosa would tend to the house. One of many slight yet noticeable differences from their usual routine was the bathroom of the master bedroom.

Every time she went into the room, after everyone had left, Rosa found water everywhere. The bath was always full. She had no idea why it was there. Nobody bathed in the morning, and she was absolutely sure it was dry in the room when she went to sleep. She tried not to dwell on these facts too much. It had probably been one of the kids playing a prank. There definitely wasn't a reason the splashes of water on the floor and walls were always in the same exact pattern, and they definitely weren't spelling out words.

Another one of these small changes was one only Eric noticed. Some nights, when he had trouble falling asleep, he'd try to sneak up to his sister's room to wake her up so he'd have someone to talk to. When he got to the door, though, she was always awake and talking. He couldn't figure out who she was talking to. There was nobody there, yet she laughed and smiled like someone had just told a joke. Eric didn't stay around long enough to hear what the conversations were about, though most of the little snippets he could hear pertained to what they did that day. All he knew was that his sister was crazy.

Wayland had been making some observations as well, though these were a bit more concerning. Ever since they'd moved, Rosa had developed more and more of a temper. In itself, this shouldn't be concerning at all. People are entitled to their emotions, he'd always said, and they should be free to express them. It wasn't concerning until he realized that she seemed to always take it out on Sylvain. If there was a mud on the floor, surely Sylvie tracked it in. Eric's shoes were just muddy from the last time it rained. When a bird got into the house, surely the girl had left the door open. Rosa wouldn't hear it when Wayland told her he remembered it bouncing open when he shut the finnicky old thing wrong that morning, and couldn't fix it while being on time. Even when Rosa had admitted to forgetting to tell Sylvain to pull the weeds in the flowerbed, she yelled at the girl for it not being done. The pattern borderlined scared Wayland, to the point where he started following his kids outside on the weekends to make sure they were alright.

This new pattern also scared Ry, who saw every encounter. She knew it all too well from her own mother's ways, and knew the spirit of the cursed woman had chosen Rosa as its carrier. Now her job was to protect the target, in this case Sylvain, and try to break the chain before it could even start. 

This would be difficult seeing as she hadn't quite figured out how to solidify herself yet. Of course, she could make herself be seen. She could also change the age she looked to be. The predicitons of what she would have looked like in the future were so interesting that she'd practiced it more than anything else. She'd also figured out how to make her voice echo, and how to revert back to how she looked at the exact time she died, but the basic skill of becoming tangible completely eluded her. It was important to be able to do this for her task. Once she lost the transparency, she'd gain back the ability to be hit by normal light. A face that's blue from a lack of air is much more likely to turn Rosa's attention away from her daughter than merely a dangling arm and some water.

For now, though, her main focus was replacing the loose strands of Rosa's rapidly fraying thread of emotional connection with ones of her own so Sylvain wouldn't feel completely desolate when the original broke. It would hurt greatly. There was nothing she could do to stop that. Ry still understood that it would be a bit easier for the child to cope if she knew she hadn't been left alone. Experience alone had taught her that.  
  
\--- 

It was a Monday in July when Rosa hurt Sylvain for the first time. She'd gone into the kitchen that morning to find mud on the floor again, this time truly Sylvie's, and her anger with the girl had finally been enough to break her. After Wayland left for work, noticably hesitant to do so when his wife was as upset as she was, Rosa brought Sylvain into the kitchen to clean the mess. Sylvain didn't resist or argue, she simply took the mop and cleaned it. No questions asked. For some reason nobody will understand, this seemed to make Rosa even angrier.  
"What, you don't even care?! Look at this, it's everywhere! And you don't even argue! You don't defend yourself?! Why?!" She screamed.  
Sylvain responded as calmly as she could, trying to hide the quiver of pure fear in her voice, "I was the one who made the mess, mum. It's only fair that I clean it up."  
The volume of Rosa's voice somehow increased again as she walked over to the shaking child. "Listen to yourself! You are a weak, useless, broken little girl who just has to go and mess up everything, aren't you?!"  
In the corner, a wet spot of flooring appeared. Ry knew those words. They'd been directed towards her more times than she could count. She opened her mouth to speak, intentionally staying hidden, to shock Rosa enought that her attention turned, but it was too late. 

Rosa's fist smashed into Sylvain's left eye with a loud thwack.

"You shouldn't have done that," Ry's said slowly, voice echoing through the room, "You really shouldn't have done that."  
"Who-who's there? Show yourself!" Rosa exclaimed.  
"Sylvain, älaskar, close your eyes please." The haunting echo vanished from Ry for just a second. Sylvain did as she was told.

When she took on the form of herself at her time of death, Ry was terrifying. Even without color. Her gown hung heavy with water, and her hair fell from it's usual neat bun to a mess of soaked curls. The hair hiding her left eye dropped to reveal a white orb which had adopted luminescent properties after she decided to become a ghost. It seemed that the top part of her left arm had been broken in half. The limb hung limp and a bit too low to be normal at her side. 

Rosa screamed, then fainted. She had been expecting a proper looking young lady, not this. The water in her bathroom made sense now. Especially the words the liquid seemed to form. 'Don't hurt her. You'll be sorry.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! Yet again, please point out grammar and plot errors. Thanks!
> 
> Translation notes:  
> älskar=love


	4. New Moder

Wayland and Eric were not told about the 'incident' between Rosa and Sylvain. The two involved said Sylvain procured her black eye from a fall and Rosa had simply had a little fainting spell. It worked on the children's tutors, and it worked on the rest of the family as well. or so it seemed. Wayland knew something was wrong. He could see the hesitance in his wife's eyes when she told the story, the way she looked around the room each time like she was expecting something to jump out of the walls. It worried him more than anything else had.

Rosa felt no remorse for hitting her daughter. None at all. In fact, she'd realized after the first time that she liked the exhilaration that came with it. Every time she could get the child alone, she dragged Sylvie into the bathroom near Rosa's bedroom and went at her. She tried to keep things in places nobody should see, such as the upper arms and legs, stomach, and back. Occasionally she'd slip and leave the girl with a black eye or bruised lip, but that was rare. The mysterious ghost always appeared after Rosa hurt Sylvain, either as soon as Sylvie left the bathroom or that night, but it didn't scare Rosa anymore. The specter couldn't do anything to her. It had made the mistake of trying to pull Rosa away from her daughter once, only to reveal that it couldn't touch things. Now the ghost was just a moving picture.

Sylvain didn't take it as well as she seemed to. At first, she had been openly frightened when her mother dragged her to the bathroom. She'd dig her heels in the floor and try to twist out of Rosa's grasp, scream when hand met skin, but now she was silent. Resistance only made the punishment worse. When she was in the room, she locked down. Not a hint of feeling passed over her face (besides pain), not the smallest sign of hatred or fear. She became a rag-doll who belonged to a violent child. 

When the wounds on her legs started becoming more noticeable, Sylvie stopped going outside with Eric. It was too risky. What if her stockings tore, or her skirt rose just a centimeter too much when she jumped? No, it was easier and safer to just stay in her room with the door locked. Most of the time Ry would join her, and they'd talk. There was one day in October, they day before Halloween in fact, that Sylvie will never forget.

It started as these conversations normally do, with Sylvain locking herself in her room and climbing onto the bed to read. Ry appeared in the corner after a few moments with a book of her own. She floated over and took her place on the right side of Sylvain's bed. The smaller of the two put her story away. With a soft, pain-filled voice she asked, "Why don't you ever stop her?"  
"What?"  
"Rosa," Sylvie elaborated, deliberately not recognizing the relation, "I know you see what she does. You show up sometimes to scare her. Why don't you pull her away?"  
Ry spoke with that calm tone she always used around Sylvain, but there was something underneath it this time. "I... I can't, barn. Try to touch my hand, you'll see."

Sylvain did as she was told. Her finger went straight through the center of Ry's hand, hitting the red quilt underneath them softly. 

"See?" Ry asked, "You can't. Likewise, I can't touch your hand."  
To demonstrate, Ry did the same thing as Sylvie. Her arm not only went through Sylvain, but through the rest of the bed as well.  
"Oh," Sylvie whispered.  
"So if I could stop her, I would. I promise you I would, älskar, but I can't. I've tried so many times. It just doesn't work."  
It was quiet for a moment before Sylvain decided to ask a question that had been eating away at her for quite a while now. "Do I still have to call her Mother?"  
Another pause, then an answer came. "While I would recommend calling her that when you're around your family, you don't have to when you're in here. You don't even have to consider her to be your mother in here."  
"I hoped you would say that. Can I ask you something else?"  
"Of course, dear. Anything."  
"Can I call you my mother instead?"

Ry looked shocked. From the start, she had been trying to form a motherly connection with Sylvain to make up for the loss. This part wasn't a surprise to her. The unexpected part was it had actually worked. Thankfully, she had made a plan for this, though she didn't think she'd have to use it until now.

"You can if you'd like," Ry said slowly, "but I'd rather you call me moder. They mean the same thing, it's just... It's important to me. Alright?"  
"Alright, moder."

The rest of that afternoon was spent in the attic. Ry read the first act of Romeo and Juliet to Sylvain, who thought the titular character were dense. She would hear to sentiments pertaining to true love as a counter. In turn, Sylvie read Ry about three chapters of Treasure Island. Ry really didn't have the heart to tell the girl that Rythian, her brother, had read that story to her so much when she was little that she'd memorized the thing. 

For a fleeting moment, the world seemed right.

\---

October 31st, 1908.

On the anniversary of their death, ghosts have to relive the experience. They could trigger it early if they wanted to, just to get it over with, but if they haven't when the time the flashback starts rolls around, it will begin automatically. Ry hated this little caveat to no end, but for reasons the girl will never know, Sylvain made it worse. It was all because Sylvie looked just like her cousin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter is going to be...interesting. 
> 
> As always, please point out plot errors and typos.
> 
> Notes:  
> moder=mother  
> älskar=love


End file.
